Extinction

north, began wailing. The sound stopped quickly, but I was sure I’d heard it. I nodded my head.

“What the hell was that about, sir?” whispered Kwon in my headset.

“Come over here,” I ordered.

Kwon came at a run and crouched against the wall of Shed Fourteen. I talked to him in the dark, while we both watched the burning trees gutter and go out.

“I think they can hear us,” I told him. “We’re using their communications equipment. They aren’t jamming our suit radios, so they must be listening in.”

“Okay, we go voice from now on?”

“Except for brief messages to another team, like your squad out there.”

“Why the firing, sir?”

I tapped the portholes that covered my eyes. “I was hoping they didn’t have these. I figured they might be using night vision gear, and our beams hitting them without warning would blind them.”

“Ah…. Who, sir?”

I glanced down at Kwon. He wasn’t winning any mensa contests tonight. “Night snipers, Sergeant.”

“Oh, you mean that guy who screamed?”

“Exactly.”

“What do we do now, sir?”

I thought about it. I looked at the turret behind me. It had to work. It was our only chance, really. If we couldn’t get some superior tech on our side, we were outnumbered a million to one by the armies of Earth, nanites or no.

“This gun isn’t going to build itself. Get up here, Sergeant. I need your strong back again. The rest of you, I want one fireteam intermittently firing into the forest to keep them honest. The rest of you climb up here. We’re going to put this thing on its mount while we still have time.”

— 9-

While we worked to mount the projector onto the turret and connect the cable, I felt needles all over my back. This time, it wasn’t the nanites, nor even my sweat. Both those things were at work, but what bugged me was the unknown. Was a sniper sighting on me right this moment? I had to be a big prize, the renegade Riggs himself. Splatting me might be worth a medal.

We hadn’t heard anything else over our radios from the scouts. I hoped that was good news. Maybe we’d rocked them back with our defensive fire. Or maybe they’d slaughtered my men and were forming up a few hundred yards away, gathering enough firepower to overwhelm us. I had no idea which it was.

When the projector was up and connected, I jumped down and Kwon followed me. His boots sank into the sandy soil until the tops of his feet vanished. I wondered how much he weighed. Full of nanites, I had to figure it was around four hundred pounds.

“Time to test this contraption,” I told him. I headed to the sleek wall of metal that flowed down like a mound over what had been Shed Fourteen. I put my knuckles up to the metal and knocked sharply. I rapped a sequence of four fast raps, followed by two more. I’d already programmed the thing to open to the series known as: shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits. I’m a sucker for the classics.

The wall turned to silver liquid and dissolved open. I stepped inside. Sandra looked at me and smiled.

“It’s hot and stuffy in here,” she complained.

“We’re about to be shanked by commandos,” I told her, “there may be some rough moments ahead.”

She shrugged and went back to whatever she was doing. I looked over her shoulder. She was tapping at a small computer of her own, but she wasn’t playing a game. Instead, it was a sequence of written steps.

“What’s up?” I said, eyeing her work.

“I’m trying my hand at programming this thing.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“Don’t act so surprised. I’m not an idiot, you know. I took some programming in high school and I had a semester of calculus. I was going to take your programming class.”

“Calculus, huh? Did you pass?”

She kicked at me, but she was sitting down and I sidestepped.

“Let me see what you’ve got,” I said.

I studied her code. That’s what it was, really, a form of source code. The whole programming experience was very free-form when you programmed these nanite-boxes. They didn’t have a specific, limited language they understood, they could understand English. The code looked like what was known as pseudocode. A series of instructions that were almost English, but more structured than English. Controlling these boxes wasn’t easy. They had the ability to talk, but that didn’t mean they were easy to talk to. They weren’t human. There were many misunderstandings. It was sort of like giving perfect instructions to a genie-one that didn’t care if it accidently killed its master.

I made a few edits. “Can I use this?”

Sandra beamed at me, and I knew I was back in.

“Of course,” she said.

I read out her instructions to the newly-hatched nanite control box for the turret. First, I named the box ‘Turret One’. Why get fancy? The tricky part came next, telling the control system what to shoot at. I had to make sure it didn’t shoot friendlies, only hostiles. The definition could easily blur when you were talking to a nanite-mind. They had sensory input, a set of inputs mounted on the projector that looked like a small nubs aimed in multiple directions.

The Nano sensors didn’t see with a vision system like our eyes for their primary sensory input, but they understood vision and colors. That sense simply wasn’t their primary one. I supposed if dogs had built the world, everything would be about scents. Humans have a sense of smell, but it is of secondary importance to them. If dogs were capable of sarcasm, I’m sure they would roll their eyes at what passed for our grasp of odors. We’d learned over time the Nano sensors had the ability to sense things in three dimensions, which was how it was able to draw maps for us. They used a form of passive radar and sonar, detecting objects and movement in relative space using multiple inputs such as vibration and radiation.

“Add to target list: Hostiles firing weaponry at this turret,” I said. That one seemed pretty safe.

“List node added successfully,” said Turret One.

“Its voice sounds weird,” commented Sandra.

“Yeah, all the boxes seem to have voices like jockeys, or adolescents. I liked the ship voices better, too.”

I figured I would start with a list of things it was allowed to shoot at. Everything else was not to be targeted. That was the easiest way to filter through a large, unknown dataset. Listing everything not to be attacked was too complex. Instead, I would try to identify the items in the smaller set, in this case legitimate targets. By definition, anything not on that short kill-list was not to be burned.

I had to be very careful, of course. If I screwed up, my little monster would burn down my own people, and it truly would be my fault. I’d felt that sort of guilt before, and I didn’t want to feel it again. I took a deep breath. Sweat tickled my face. Sandra was right, it was stuffy in here.

“Add to target list: Hostiles firing on me, Kyle Riggs.”

Sandra watched me with her eyes wide. She knew the stakes. She’d seen the Alamo get excited and kill a crowd of innocents before. “Why don’t you just tell it to shoot at any soldier without nanites?” she asked.

“What if Kerr comes back asking to call it off? Do we just automatically blast him?” I asked, then I waved for her to be quiet. She looked annoyed. I decided to worry about that later. If the enemy hit us now and this thing didn’t fire at them, it was worthless. But if it killed my own men, it was worse than worthless.

“Add to target list: Hostiles firing on Sandra, or Sergeant Kwon.”

“Biotic identities of defensive contacts imprinted,” said the box.

That’s as far as I got before we heard the thump and scream of a mortar. I hunkered over Sandra, shielding